Exploring our stories and gentle action

I’m a big fan of gentle right now, but I wasn’t always. It wasn’t that long ago when I had “gentle my ass” on my fridge. I grew up with, “You’ve got to work hard to get what you want.”

But I’m now seeing how gentle compassion leads to ease, which is much nicer than hard. Especially with money. Who wants to live with the story of ‘money is hard’?

Today, I was talking to a beautiful group of women about their intentions with money, and something that came through in their stories was what was missing from their current relationship. A theme that came up was discomfort when the bank account went above a certain amount.

There was a time in my past life when I would go straight in with practical strategies and systems…

• Open up a new bank account to store the extra cash.

• Make it hard to access so you can’t just spend it.

• Set a schedule to move your money.

• Create a budget and a savings goal.

• Set spending days.

• Limit purchases outside those days.

Guess how sustainable that was?

The thing is, there’s a reason for our current behavior. Subconscious beliefs and stories drive us to behave in certain ways, even if our current-day self has other hopes. We have competing needs inside us, and unless we can come to some resolution, some part of us will be unhappy or in pain.

And this is where exploring our stories comes in.

Liz and Maryanne

Liz and Maryanne both have an internal ‘set-point’ for their bank balances. When the bank balance moves past $2,500, they both start to experience tightness in their bodies and are compelled to spend it.

We can take the practical approach and bring in all those actions above. That will all work for a while, but it’s like dieting - at some point, the pressure builds, and then you ‘self-sabotage’ and beat yourself up for it.

Instead, let’s take a look at their stories.

Liz

Liz is of a certain generation, in a certain place, and grew up with, “We are good, hardworking people, and we’re fortunate to have enough.” You might have a similar story. The ‘so what’ of this story is that moving too far past your threshold means you’re no longer ‘good, hardworking people,’ which can lead you to spend any excess or hide it from yourself. We value good people, and Liz wants to be valued.

That story has a certain set of actions to shift the behavior...

• We address this idea of ‘good people have enough.’ Is this a universal truth, or is a cultural truth?

• We build strategies to settle the nervous system.

• We work to decouple our inherent value from our bank account.

• We practice receiving money, with love and joy.

• We allow more money to sit in the account, and collect evidence that we are still beautiful humans.

• We build the safety nets we were never able to build before because ‘good people don’t have too much’.

We take gentle, compassionate action, to create sustained and sustainable change. Life is good, right?

Maryanne

Now let me tell you about Maryanne. She has increased her business revenue by 50%, but her bank account is still the same. The thing is, her story isn’t the “We are good, hardworking people who have enough.”

Instead, she remembers the feast-famine cycle in her childhood and remembers that when they had more, people would line up to collect the money they were owed. Her story was that as soon as they had money, it was gone, and it was never gone because of beautiful, fun things. It was gone because other people took it. So now that she has money coming in, she’s spending it on all this beautiful stuff that she never had as a kid, and then finding herself stressed about how she’s going to make ends meet again.

Giving her the same action plan that Liz would have might work, but it probably won’t last. Instead, we hold space for Maryanne to acknowledge that her 5-year-old self is scared that money will be taken away from her. That part of her needs reassurance that we’re not in the same space, and we’re grown-ups who are pretty darn resourceful (her gross was nearing $200k! You don’t get there without being resourceful).

Maryanne also needs a safe space to look at what bills are coming in, what bills are likely to come in, and what money is there to meet those bills. This can feel scary, but I’ve never had someone tell me, “That was just as bad as I thought it would be.”

With those numbers, we can then take a look at what is left over and explore Maryanne’s hopes and dreams. We create a plan for the money that is left over, so she isn’t spending unconsciously, and we center her intentions for her money around her intentions for her life.

So what?

Here’s the takeaway:

If we try to take action today without understanding the past, we can find ourselves working ‘hard’ for little reward.

If you haven’t already, grab my Money Relationship Workbook. Explore the stories you hold about money. What gentle action might you take to start shifting the stories you hold?